Home. Christianpersecution.jpg (JPEG Image, 600 × 408 pixels) Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist? Why Atheism Will Replace Religion. By In earlier posts ( here and here ), I documented a clear pattern where atheism blossoms in fast-paced developed countries but is virtually absent in less developed nations (1).
The implication is that as countries around the globe get wealthier and more fast-paced, religion will decline. In a new study, I have found the most compelling evidence yet for this possibility. It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people expect to die young.
In a recent (2011) study of 137 countries (2) I found that belief in God was higher in countries with a heavy load of infectious diseases, shortening life expectancy and condemning many to a long battle with chronic illnesses such as malaria. Yet, the 2011 study had a weakness. The 9 Epiphanies That Shifted My Perspective Forever. By David Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling.
They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever. The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it. Maybe you’ve had some of the same insights. 1. The first time I heard somebody say that, I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience.
If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’sdoing the observing? 2. Of course! 3. 4. 5. Yikes. Zentips. How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God. Why are some people more religious than others?
Answers to this question often focus on the role of culture or upbringing. While these influences are important, new research suggests that whether we believe may also have to do with how much we rely on intuition versus analytical thinking. In 2011 Amitai Shenhav, David Rand and Joshua Greene of Harvard University published a paper showing that people who have a tendency to rely on their intuition are more likely to believe in God. They also showed that encouraging people to think intuitively increased people’s belief in God. Building on these findings, in a recent paper published in Science, Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia found that encouraging people to think analytically reduced their tendency to believe in God. Gervais and Norenzayan’s research is based on the idea that we possess two different ways of thinking that are distinct yet related.
Atheism: Proving The Negative: 100 Reasons to Believe that God Does Not Exist.